Generally, casinos attempt to populate the casino gaming floor with games that captivate and maintain player interest. Many electronic gaming machines (EGM) allow games to be inter-changed from the machines as needed without physically moving the gaming machine itself. More particularly, the more popular games may be installed in EGMs and the less popular games may be removed from the EGMs.
Currently, when the game and any associated game content is removed from the EGM, a complete erasure of the EGM's persistent memory is required. In other words, today when the game is removed, the gaming machine must be reset, which includes resetting the accounting meters. Historically, the erasure was required to establish a coherent starting point, without any “out of context” residual meters from the previous game content. If the residual meters had been retained, then there would be complications with calculating the new game performance and the weighted theoretical percentage of the new game or overall EGM. As stated above, historical procedure required a complete erasure of the EGM's persistent memory. This effectively treated the EGM as a newly installed machine with no history of ever being played, or having money and/or credit inserted or dispensed. Any statistical data of the EGM's performance was lost as a result of this erasure.
Another side effect of the aforementioned erasure of EGM's persistent memory is that networked host systems monitoring the EGM are required to close out the accounting books on the EGM and open a new set of accounting books for the EGM with a new identifier. Effectively, this results in the EGM appearing as a completely new unit with a new unique network identifier.
What is needed is an accounting system and method to maintain and manage accounting information for games that have been removed from one or more gaming machines. Additionally, what is needed is an accounting system and method that includes a strategy to restore information associated with removed games from a gaming machine and resume accounting meters at values that were captured at the time a game was removed, all without corrupting the balance of the related accounting meters.